inportb

Normally, CrossOver costs $40-$70. For one day only on October 28th, CodeWeavers will be giving away their software for free, complete with technical support.

In July, CodeWeavers launched the Great American Lame Duck Presidential Challenge to encourage President Bush to make the most of his remaining days in office by accomplishing a major economic or political goal by January 20, 2009. Due to an unexpected success on the part of Mr. Bush, every American (no, anyone) can now have CrossOver software for free.

To get the software, just visit the CoveWeavers website tomorrow for a promotion code. CrossOver is a commercial Wine-based distribution that lets Mac OS X and Linux users run Windows programs.

Ubuntu 8.10 testers who upgraded their Firefox setups to version 3.0.2 have noticed a gratuitous End-User License Agreement presented by the kind folks at Mozilla. This is the first time that Mozilla has asked Canonical to include an EULA, a controversial action that has triggered substantial debate over at Launchpad and Ubuntu Forums.

(continue reading…)

KDE 4.1 is now available for general use. This first major update to KDE 4 brings the KDE PIM suite, various Plasma improvements, and many other features. Plasma can now replace the KDE 3 shell for most casual users. Indeed, the whole KDE 4 can now replace KDE 3, as it’s gotten so polished.

Get it while it’s hot! Packages are already available for various distributions such as Kubuntu.

The performance issues with NVidia’s proprietary driver still exist, however. Engineers at NVidia are aware of this problem, but they have not yet issued a fix.

KDE 4.1.1 is due on September 3rd, and KDE 4.2 will arrive at the end of January next year.

Since it takes so long for me to install new software every time I reinstall, I figured that I’d create a metapackage that pulls in all the software I need. After I’ve done that, I was thinking, “what about setting up a repository too?” It’s not necessary, since dpkg is sufficient for working with metapackages, but somehow working with apt-get feels cleaner. I’ll be putting other packages up as well that may be of public interest.

A new HAL was recently released that allowed MadWifi to support the AR5007/AR2425 devices by Atheros. Last month, there were still some hiccups with the code, but it seems smooth enough for general consumption now. The new driver supports both 32-bit and 64-bit environments, unlike the older 32-bit-only hack. As a bonus, I successfully patched the code for injection.

The commands required to checkout, patch, build, and install the driver are rather simple. I’m posting it here both as a note to myself and for public benefit.

(continue reading…)